help i'm alive
by MandeePotter
Summary: in which eponine's blood splattered enjolras's old torn shirt and no one quite looks up to enjolras these days [zombie au]


**Reposted from tumblr with a few slight edits. Enjoy!**

* * *

They'd been traveling together for two years, fighting off zombies and scavenging through the city. They were as close as can be, they were united. They were rebellious, and wild.

Despite the constant terror and horror around them, they founds ways to make the best out of everything.

Until they got trapped in a mall overrun with zombies. They cornered them, and they weren't armed heavily enough. The zombies killed two of them before they got away. Marius, and Enjolras didn't depart with the others.

Enjolras was the leader, he always had been. He was the most level headed one out of all of them. He knew how to fight, and he was brilliantly smart. The only reason he died was to try and get the horde of zombies away from the others. He diverted them after they caught Marius, and the rest managed to escape, and lock the the zombies in the mall. Before they exited, they saw their grimy teeth sinking into Marius's dead body, and Eponine couldn't help but vomit. Then, they heard him.

Enjolras was pale and grotesque. Two zombies were chewing on his limbs and he looked at everyone, pausing for a moment to take in all of their faces, and whispered, "End this. Then get rid of me."

Everyone else stood in shock, but she knew how bad it must be. She saw her own brother die this way, and she had no way to help him. She raised her gun, a rusty old thing scavenged from a history museum and shot at Enjolras. She hit him in the heart, killing him quickly, and shot him another few times to scare the zombies away from the corpse. Blood dripped out of his dead body as the group ran out.

* * *

They spent the night at an abandoned cafe that they usually used for safety.

No one had much to say, and most of the men cried quietly, and Eponine couldn't help herself from letting out gasping sobs. She had been closest to Marius, despite his love for a girl that made her way out of France before the horror hit. Marius constantly pined for her, '_oh cosette, i wish i could talk to her, i wish i could be there for her'_, which never failed to annoy the rest of their little group. However, Eponine had simply been a homeless girl when all of this had hit, and it was Marius's idea to allow her to join them. She was in his debt eternally for that.

The group disbanded on that night. Jehan, Bahorel, Combeferre, and Feuilly made off on their own overnight without saying anything to the others. Eponine wondered if they simply made the decision or if they left without regrets.

The next day, Jehan's mangled corpse could be seen on the bridge by the cafe.

Joly and Bossuet agreed to leave together to search for Musichetta, a leader of another band of survivors, to ask if they could join them. They parted amiably with the rest, quietly exiting.

Grantaire, Courfeyrac and Eponine woke up alone together. And so they became their own group.

* * *

"He told us to get rid of him. You know what that means," Grantaire said quietly as they all gathered what they had left, getting ready to leave the cafe.

Courfeyrac's family had a house in the countryside, and they all decided that it could be their best shot. Dangerous, but promising. It was a remote location, and they could grow food, and they had plenty of room. It would be dumb to refuse.

"So what? We go back to the mall?" Eponine said, feeling confused. It was dangerous enough the first time around, who knew if they would survive it again.

"Yes. For Enjolras," Grantaire said resolutely. Courfeyrac bit his lip but nodded. Eponine understood. Enjolras wasn't quite a glue sticking them as one, or a rope binding them together, he was merely a human, despite the godly nicknames everyone always awarded him with. He was no metaphor. He was a human who held out his hands and let these men, these apostles, to follow him. She was simply a Mary Magdalene in his wake. They needed to follow out his last words, they who were left were his apostles' creed.

* * *

When they arrived at the mall, Courfeyrac and Grantaire agreed that Eponine didn't need to see them cut out his brain and dispose of it. She couldn't bring herself to argue. She held her rifle and stood guard outside the doors.

Eponine never thought of herself as weak, if she could pride herself on one thing, it was her strength. How weak could a girl who fought zombies and grew up on the wasted streets be anyway? But it was another thing entirely to see her last two friends desecrate their dead leader. If a brain was taken from a corpse, it wouldn't be reanimated into a zombie. Joly experimented on some dead bodies towards the beginning of the infestation, and they learned a few tricks like that.

After a little more than an hour Courfeyrac walked out, splattered with shining blood.

"Grantaire?" She asked almost desperately.

"He's in there. He's alive. He's putting down Marius. He already…changed," Courfeyrac said, his voice knotting up. Eponine rubbed furiously at her eyes, trying to keep the tears at bay.

"So Grantaire is safe then? You should probably be backing him up," she said.

"He'll be fine. He wants just a little more time here in Paris, and he'll meet up with us there. The trip should take a day, maybe more," he said rubbing the back of his neck.

Eponine couldn't help but worry, the entire situation was too strange. But Enjolras was the closest thing Grantaire had to a best friend, and it made sense that he might not want to take the journey with them. And as strange as it seemed, Grantaire was invincible, he was a brilliant fighter for an uncoordinated drunk, and no zombie had ever laid so much as a finger on him. So she took a leap of faith and left.

* * *

Grantaire arrived soon after they left in the middle of the night, carrying a backpack full of booze and seeds for them to plant in the garden.

The entire estate was huge, and lavish. Eponine discovered the library, and Grantaire found the wine cellar. Everyone seemed to find a hollow sort of happiness that filled them for a while. After a bit, the days seemed to move on by.

The nights were a different story.

They all threw down blankets in the den, by the fireplace and slept by each other. Eponine woke up from nightmares screaming, as Courfeyrac's insomnia kept him up to comfort her. Grantaire took a bit of coaxing and booze to doze off, but when he did sleep, he was silent and immobile. Only once had his lips formed a name, too silent for Eponine to hear.

Grantaire and Courfeyrac visited a shed by the gardens frequently. Eponine was never invited to come along, and when she tried to follow one time, they both gently shook their heads, and told her to go back to the library, because it was 'their' spot. At first, she assumed that it was them being sexist ten year olds, with a 'no girls allowed!' fort, but when she saw their melancholy expressions when exiting she knew that it was their spot to reminiscence and long for their old friends. They were the only two left who truly understood the entire weight of what they had lost.

After all, they were the apostles. She was only the tag-along.

* * *

She found out why they didn't want her in their shed.

Enjolras was there.

They were the biggest fucking idiots she had ever met.

Mottled skin, with odd scrapes and cuts scattered about, as pale as can be, hair hanging limply down, he raised his dead eyes to her. She threw her hands over her mouth and ran to the other end of the shed, holding back a scream. He was tied up, hands hanging above his head. He didn't even seem motivated enough to pull against the restraints. She couldn't help but to move closer and inspect him.

He wore his white tee shirt, stained horribly with his own blood, and possibly even the blood of others. She could see where bullets riddled though his chest, shot from her own rifle. His knees rested on the floor below her. All she could see were the holes scattered through his flesh. He even still had that dumb red flag that he tied around himself as a symbol of their group's unity. Even if it had a giant tear through it.

"Oh, Enjolras, I'm so sorry," she whispered, "I did this."

She looked up to his eyes and she saw it. Understanding.

A garbled noise came out of his mouth as she walked out, and she could have sworn that she heard him say, 'No'.

* * *

Grantaire and Courfeyrac had been training him for months like a puppy, or something stupid like that. He wandered around the house now, he knew better than to attack them, they fed him small rabbits and squirrels and other things that they could hunt in the meadows nearby. He somehow seemed to know better than to hurt them too.

Sometimes Eponine would drag him to the library and read out loud to him, even if she was selfish and read her own favorites instead of his. But she still couldn't help but grin when she remembered the look on his usually vacant face the first time she sat with him, words dripping out of her sweet mouth.

His expression wasn't as vacant these days, and he could even choke out some words. Grantaire always loved to remind everyone that his favorite word was probably 'Ponine'.

Courfeyrac spent hours pouring over medical books, trying to teach himself ways to work on Enjolras, even though he was positive that he wouldn't dare touch him or try to alter him until he was positive about what he was doing.

* * *

Sometime in late December Enjolras slept next to Eponine and his lips touched the back of her bare neck and then she knew that she was in love with that of children's nightmares, and that despite her love for simple Disney movies, she had turned into a Grimm faerytale princess and she couldn't shake the feeling that her fate would be as twisted as all their heroines.

After all, she was doomed from the start.

* * *

He looked like himself. Human.

Words came from his soft lips, edgy and stuttering, but even if they trembled Eponine drank them in, like Grantaire with his bottle of choice on bad days.

He held her every night and she kissed his neck and recited poetry because if he couldn't speak the words, then she would help him.

He smelled sweet and his skin wasn't marble anymore, it was ivory.

He ate vegetables from the gardens at dinner and cringed away at the rabbit meat that they slowly stopped placing before him.

One day she kissed him, softly, as if telling him her secrets, and his hands found her hips, thumbs rubbed against her prominent bones and he spun her around, holding himself over her, changing the kiss into something more passionate, yet his lips still moved slowly, taking her in. When her eyelashes fluttered open she saw his eyes staring into hers as he whispered things that had been unsaid for _so_ long and a certain crooked grace strained through his lips as they reconnected.

* * *

**So yeah, quite a lot of grammar edits since I've posted this on tumblr. Feedback honestly means so much! I don't think I'll quite continue the wallflower and the champion, so I apologize for that, but I'll be writing a fic on pursuit of happiness. It won't be a sequel so much as that drabbleshot will be a companion to it. But first to come: a Grantaire drabbleshot!**

**Message me on tumblr if you're interested in the fic, because I'm always looking for oc ideas ;] .com**


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